


the sum of all our scars

by memorysdaughter



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Curses, Gen, Healing, Sarenrae, Screw Destiny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-29
Updated: 2016-06-29
Packaged: 2018-07-18 23:15:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7334866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/memorysdaughter/pseuds/memorysdaughter
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by Tumblr user shorthalt's au prompt: "I want a cr au where pike physically feels all the pain that she heals from others."</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sum of all our scars

**Author's Note:**

> The rest of the prompt:  
> "No but like.
> 
> Sarenrae gifted her divine healing and magic, but for some unknown reason she was cursed by some intangible thing and now the pain she heals is the pain she feels.
> 
> Resurrection means she’s felt death time after time. She remembers her death. She remembers the emptiness of Grog’s. The loss of innocence within the young boy and his death.
> 
> Every wound, every cut, every broken bone, she takes within when she takes away. She feels the excruciating, the aching, the shaking and the toxins and the sickness.
> 
> She feels everything, but she’s not the one who’s going to have the scars, so she grits her teeth and she deals with it and she goes right back into the chaos, feeling the pain so others don’t have to."

For the first year she’s with them, they don’t notice.

They don’t see how her hands shake when she comes to heal them, as though she’s tentatively reconsidering every single decision that led her to that moment and every single one she’ll make going forward.  She’s walking on eggshells, feet pinned to a path she had no ability to choose, the path that’ll kill her.

_(Kill her again.)_

They don’t seem to hear her sharp intake of breath as she guides the light of Sarenrae down their bodies, repairing injuries both inside and out.  They look past the way she grits her teeth and how she locks her elbows against her body like she’s holding everything vital inside a skeleton that’s betraying her, no longer made of bone but some sort of flaking chalk, ready to wither away at the merest hint of a breeze.

They don’t find it odd that she emerges from battle exhausted, weak, nauseous, coated in a sickly sheen of sweat, blood dripping from her nose.  Or that, on average, she sleeps a solid eighteen hours following any major healing work.  Or the way she runs fevers, high enough to blind an ordinary person, if she can’t sink into the rest her body desperately craves. She gets twitchy, anxious, skin crawling, the voices in her head absolutely overwhelming, begging with her to just put the world down, to replenish everything she’s lost.

All they see is the magic she works.

They don’t see how close she is to the edge.

She can’t blame them.  She knows what she does is miraculous.  Knows she’s to be feared, to be praised, for being the last-ditch effort between Vox Machina and death.  She can see how easy it is to take her for granted.

And she’ll never let any of them fall, not while she has breath in her body and Sarenrae’s name on her lips, and so she gets up, fighting through the haze of pain and fever and chills, golden light in her hands, struggling to breathe, because she’ll never let them know that everything she heals them from runs through her body.

She’ll never tell, not if it means she can keep them safe.

_(But she’s too young to feel this old, and all she feels is old.)_

 

* * *

 

Then she dies.

Then she’s brought back by a cleric who’s seen her kind before.

A cleric who’s seen her kind before and who has a big mouth.

_What do you think you’re doing with her?_ he demands of her friends, his voice loud in the stillness of the sickroom, Pike’s croupy, wet, reborn breaths the only other noise. _Don’t you know you can’t just take them out on the battlefield? You’re like to kill her! You did just kill her!_

Pike hiccups and coughs, leaning over the side of the bed they’ve laid her on, vomiting before she can stop herself.  It’s bright red and she can’t breathe.  She’s going to die again, right there, mere inches from Sarenrae’s grasp.

_Which one of you did she heal?_ the cleric barks.

_All of us!_ Keyleth stammers, her eyes full of tears. _She heals all of us!_

The cleric swears under his breath and moves to Pike’s side. _Oh, little one,_ he murmurs, holding her feverish, aching body up so she can clear her airway. _Why didn’t they tell you…?_

She looks up at him. _They told me,_ she gets out as more blood pours from her mouth. _Of course they told me.  Why do you think I’m here?_

Before she falls back into unconsciousness, her body convulsing from the blood loss, she has mere seconds to see the looks in Vox Machina’s eyes.

For the first time in a year, they’ve noticed.

And now they’re terrified.

 

* * *

 

They should be.

There’s a name for what she is - what she is, and what others like her are called.   _Clercs du sang._   Clerics of the blood.

They’re rare.  And feared.  And nobody talks about them because, for the most part, nobody knows they exist.

_(They don’t live long enough to make an impression.)_

Sarenrae’s gifts are blessings.  The curse that comes along with those gifts, for one in a billion - okay, so she has no idea how many are out there - is just that: a curse.  Poor parents drown a child with her curse; rich parents spend heaps of gold trying to get rid of it.  But though there are endless streams of powerful wizards, mages, and other assorted spellcasters throughout the world, none of them can get rid of the _du sang_ curse.  That’s not to say they haven’t tried.

Wilhand saw it in her first, the cherry-red thumbprint behind her left ear, a stubborn mark that wouldn’t go away with scrubbing, or magic use, or even crude surgery.  He hid his suspicions until she was ten, until two houses in the temple district were collapsed in a storm, and there were too many people for him to heal on his own.

_I need your help,_ he’d said. _And I promise, you can help.  But there’s something I need to tell you first. _

He’d laid it out in front of her as simply as possible.

_You are a daughter of our Dawnflower, sworn to fight for redemption, second chances, and restoration.  It’s in your blood to heal.  But there’s something else in your blood.  Every injury you heal… the pain will come to you.  You won’t have any scars, you won’t be disfigured, you won’t lose any limbs - but you’re going to feel all of it. _

_You’ll hear a lot of things about who you are - that you’re sick, that you’re evil, that you shouldn’t be proud of who you are and what you can do.  But I love you, my dumpling, and I know you can do so much good.  I’ll be right beside you the entire time, I promise._

That day she’d healed a man who’d had his abdomen crushed when part of a stone wall fell on him.  As soon as she’d touched him, the light of Sarenrae pouring from her, his pain grabbed her around the waist and yanked her in close.  She felt her ribcage crack and warp; her muscles twisted and tore, her skin going dark purple and blue as she bruised from the inside out.  She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t talk, couldn’t yell out for help.  She’d collapsed on the floor next to the now completely-healed man, vomiting and sobbing, blood pouring from her nose.

She slept for three days straight afterwards.

It hadn’t changed anything about how she felt about Sarenrae’s love, or what she wanted to do with all of that power in her grasp.

At least, it hadn’t, until she died.

 

* * *

 

She sees their eyes on her as she joins them, the morning before a battle.  She hears what they’re whispering to each other, fragments of conversations they had with her before, conversations she didn’t listen to.

_She’s too fragile._

_Liable to get herself killed again._

_What do we know about this healing “curse”?_

_What if she heals us and it kills her?_

_Who heals her then?_

Vox Machina goes around in circles.  Pike’s become a straight line.  She hefts her mace and her shield as she leaves their camp, and if the cherry-red thumbprint behind her ear throbs just a little harder, she ignores it.

She’s a straight line.  She’s a daughter of the Dawnflower.  She chooses her own destiny, not whatever curse sings in her blood.

 

* * *

 

Pike blinks, hard.  The forest is mostly quiet around her, save for the voices of Vox Machina, lying wounded in the underbrush.  Their enemy for the morning, some sort of hellbeast capable of spitting poison as well as delivering fearsome attacks with claws and razor-sharp teeth, is dead in pieces on the ground.  The rest of her compatriots have done the hard work - now it’s her turn.

She’s closest to Vex, so she goes to her first.  The half-elf looks up, shaking her head as Pike approaches.   _No_ , she grunts out. _You heard what the cleric said -_

Pike holds up her hand, silencing Vex’s protests. _This is my job.  Let me do my job._

Golden light spills from Pike’s hand.  Pain slices into her abdomen as the gashes on Vex’s stomach close and heal.  Pike shakes it off, waits for the world to become steady around her again, and moves onto Vax, just a few feet away from his twin.

He repeats Vex’s protests. _No. Don’t do this to yourself._

_Shh_ , Pike gets out, and she reaches down, pressing her radiant fingers to Vax’s chest.

Poison spills through her system like acid across her forearms.  She retches and heaves, the pain from Vex’s abdominal wounds still blazing, and she nearly goes to her knees then and there.  She finds herself murmuring a prayer to Sarenrae and a little bit of that golden reassurance floods her limbs.  It’s enough to stabilize her, keep her on her feet.

_(It’s not enough to keep her from turning to the nearest bush and vomiting up her breakfast.)_

She slogs over to Keyleth.  The druid is pale, her eyes wide, shaking her head. _Pike, sit down_ , she pleads.

_Not… until… I’m… finished_ , Pike says firmly, a gasping breath between each word.  She sees no visible wounds on Keyleth at first; a few seconds of investigation reward her, though - Keyleth cradles one elbow in her opposite hand.  Prying her fingers away Pike can see it’s red and swollen, likely dislocated.

_It’s going to hurt,_ Pike says, a bit drunkenly, and she takes Keyleth’s elbow firmly in her tiny gnomish hands.

Pain roars through her and for a split second Pike’s convinced she’s passed out.  It’s only a resurgence of the poison still creeping through her system that reminds her she’s still very much upright and conscious.  She gags and chokes, but her fingers refuse to let Keyleth’s elbow go until the healing’s done.

Pike staggers across the clearing to Scanlan.  He holds up an empty healing potion bottle. _I’m all right, baby.  Don’t you worry about me._

There’s worry in his eyes, though, something Pike would want to explore in greater detail if every single movement she made wasn’t fraught with someone else’s agony.  She turns to Grog.

Her buddy Grog shakes his head. _I’m fine_ , he says, but she can see it’s not true.

_Just… be ready,_ Pike gets out.

Solemnly Grog nods.

One hand still clenched around her holy symbol, Pike brings her other hand down onto his chest.

It’s Vex’s abdomen wounds times a hundred, plus the poison from Vax times five, added to some sort of organ-shearing, muscle-twisting, bone-shattering internal pain that sets Pike’s body on fire with anguish.  Every breath becomes a torture, but she clings to him.  It’s Grog’s pain that finally drops her to her knees.  She coughs and vomits bright red, spattering the clearing with everyone else’s afflictions.

_Okay_ , she whimpers to Grog as her vision gets dim. _I’m all done._

As she loses consciousness, she feels his arms wrap around her, holding her close.  She can’t breathe, she can’t stand, she can’t see, and she knows only two sensations.  Pain… and safety.

Pike’s made her choice - she’s not going to fight the curse in her blood.

And Vox Machina made their choice - they’re going to do whatever it takes to prove to her that despite all of this, despite every sacrifice she’ll make to heal them -

_(because they know damn well she’s never going to let them suffer)_

\- then they’re going to make sure that once she falls, when she can no longer take care of them… they’ll take care of her.  Until she wakes from her torturous rest, they’ll watch over her.  Keep her safe.

It’s not as good as a cure, Pike thinks.

It’s better.


End file.
